Flúirse seem to be really stepping up their game this year in the now saturated goldmine of teacher summer courses. Until the end of April, Flúirse Education Solutions were offering free 3G Modems to every teacher that enrols on one of their Online Summer Courses.
Director of the Summer Course Programme, Tomás Finneran, explained where the idea originated:
“We had the idea after spotting a tech-savvy teacher “tweeting” that he was unable to show footage of the Icelandic Volcano to his class, as once again his school broadband let him down. It wasn’t the first time that broadband access issues had annoyed teachers, with many teacher websites such as Anseo.net and seomraranga.com campaigning for reasonable access to allow teachers make full use of the internet as a learning and teaching resource.”
Flúirse were one of the first companies to offer an independent programme of ICT related online courses for Primary Schools Teachers. It led the way for anyone with a working knowledge of Moodle to set up shop and provide summer courses. However Flúirse are now the largest provider of Web-based courses for primary school teachers with over 50 courses announced at this year’s programme launch. The company offer courses in almost every area imaginable when it comes to ICT and education. For example, I believe they are the only Irish company offering summer courses in Linux. And it’s not just geeks like me that want courses like that. Last year, its advanced course in Edubuntu (a Linux OS) was booked out! This year, they aim to have a few hundred teachers tweeting. Here’s hoping!
